In this terrifying PowerPoint presentation, Sophia Naeem examines the many ways that the world is heading toward an apocalyptic future like the one described in Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake. She provides specific examples of recent scientific innovations in artificial intelligence, robotics, and cloning, paired with scientific charts and news clips documenting mass extinctions, the effects of climate change, worldwide hunger, and ongoing global war, in order to demonstrate how close we are to a perfect storm.

While “Dystopia, 2050” functions in part as an analysis of Oryx and Crake, revealing just how well-researched Atwood’s post-apocalyptic novel really is, it also functions as a warning in its own right. Naeem makes explicit connections to current events that are rendered vague or remote in Atwood’s near future. In Naeem’s vision, the seeds of our destruction are already here, already named, and already familiar. Will the posthuman apocalypse cease to seem uncanny by the time we arrive?

Read Naeem’s reflection here.

In this haunting sketch, Benjamin Musheyev imagines a modern-day Dr. Jekyll whose “Mr. Hyde” is summoned not by a personalized potion, but by cocaine. As Musheyev notes in his reflection, several details in the illustration should alert the observant viewer to Dr. Jekyll’s true nature: although he appears to be a handsome man in a lab coat, his pupils are dilated and the corner of a baggie sticks out of the coat pocket. The baggie, positioned between the embroidered “Dr. Jekyll” of his coat and the “H” on his stethoscope, implicitly functions as the mediating force between his two states of being. The images in the background appear to describe the doctor’s tragic “origin story.”

While several contemporary television programs, such as Elementary and House, have explored the addiction issues described by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle in his Sherlock Holmes stories (the first of which was published just five years after The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde), Musheyev uses a Victorian precedent to explore a character who — unlike Sherlock — cannot control his addiction well enough to function in society. Perhaps it’s an idea whose time has come.